The article derides him for for stating platitudes, truisms, and cliches (I am actually surprised that the article didn't include that word) in new and interesting ways. However, that is exactly what he is popular for in the first place. A more charitable way to put that, might be to say that he restates old-timey wisdom in new and interesting ways. Of course this is going to appeal to conservatives, and bring struggling young people to the conservative side.

Between Jordan Peterson and C.S. Lewis, I rediscovered a lot of wisdom that my parents tried to teach me. I learned to respect old and ancient ideas. Ideas aren't "wrong" because they're old, and also they aren't right or good because they're new. People throughout history was smarter and wiser than we give them credit for.

Maybe if more "serious" intellectuals (whatever that means), moved past the "new=good and old=bad" groove, they might start enjoying some popularity too.

My point is that Jordan Peterson is re-introducing some very true, but old ideas. These old ideas are very helpful to a lot of people, especially disenfranchised young men. These young men then use the old ideas to get their lives together, and that is why Jordan Peterson is popular.

> "He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle."

No, he shows us the gold that our intellectuals threw on the rubbish heap, because they thought it was junk. And just because they still think it is junk, doesn't actually make it junk.

The problem is that these "very true" ideas have gone out of fashion for a reason: they don't scale. It might all be well and good to say "be civilized or I'll kick the shit out of you" when you're trying to sort out a neighbourhood dispute; but when you scale them up to, say, foreign policy, you're just courting armageddon. Our world is getting bigger and bigger, trying to fit it into old ideological boxes is only going to generate more misplaced (literal) crusades.

The really good and true methodologies actually scale properly in every direction, but they're harder to dumb down.

And I strong argument can be made that world is more peaceful in part because of the threat of violence (and the potential for violence to be more expensive than diplomacy).

Ans yes, the threat of nuclear armageddon is real.. but there is also good reason to believe that violence is declining (see Better Angels - Stephen Pinker).

However, the author of the OP article is throwing shade on JBP because he is rehashing old ideas like "tell the truth, be true to yourself, see challenges as opportunities, set a good example." Those won't exactly lead to a crusade, would it? Even if you scale it up, that's some good and true wisdom. The author shows his folly by discarding these "old, stale" ideas for no other reason than them being old, stale ideas.

Also to quote the article:

> He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom

Yes, because fatherly life-advice is straight-up wisdom. Wisdom is remarkably mundane at times. Also, if you look at these ideas in their abstract:

clean your room -> take care of what you have, even if it is little

stand up straight -> have some self-respect

These abstract ideas also scale up well. That's also not exactly crusade material.

Who isn't saying this stuff?

Those two factions are still alive in the ANC now that it is the ruling party. It just takes a different shape now that violence isn't the modus operandi anymore. You could call it a far-left radical faction, and a moderate faction. The far-left radical faction is heavily influenced by Fanon, they openly admit it. Also on the far-left you have the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) who were kicked out of the ANC for being too far-left. They also claim to be Fanonian. They are openly calling for violence, while simultaneously denying that they are calling for violence.

The violence prevalent in South Africa is caused by a wide array of causes, of which I expect Fanonian thought to be one of the lesser causes (but a cause none-the-less). A bigger cause is an inept and corrupt government by a political party that is still stuck in revolutionary rhetoric 30 years after it's victory. Their inept and corrupt governance caused degradation in law-enforcement, to the point where it is almost non-existent. Pair this with the abject poverty and fatherlessness caused by Apartheid, and you have yourself an unruly and violent populace.

Fanonian thought only factors in when things get political. In my opinion that is less commonplace than the media (both mainstream and otherwise) suggests. Our violence is mostly just normal plain old crime.

To nuance it further: the ANC was, if I'm not mistaken, originally heavily influenced if not part and parcel of Gandhi's pacifist movement, only to break away through the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, i.e. the armed branch actually founded by Nelson Mandela in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre. That said, the ANC was (and maybe still is) influenced by Gandhian thinking, and never really implemented the policy of including "soft targets" in the tactics with any enthusiasm.

I believe Nelson Mandela embodied this conflict, and more than being clearly on one side tried to balance the factions, and did so with some success. His enduring legacy in my mind is his reconciliation efforts, clearly Gandhi inspired, without which South Africa would perhaps still be embroiled in violent political conflict, a la Palestine.

Thank you very much for this write-up.

I lost my 21 year old brother in law to leukemia a few years back. Even though I didn't experience the same severity of pain as my wife or in-laws, I was still there through all of it. I saw my parents-in-law taking care of their dying son, who only a few months ago was a promising ornithology student, and the fittest player on his soccer team. What you wrote resonates a lot with what they said, and what I saw them go through.

Thank you for including the reference to Daniel 3, it has been a source of strength for my in-laws too. My brother-in-law got a lot of his strength from Philippians 1:21 "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

The love and care that you provide to your son does not go unnoticed or unseen.

One thing I learned from my in-laws' tragedy, was that the grief never goes away, but you will grow stronger in dealing with it.

I will be hugging my own kids extra-hard when I get home from work this afternoon.

Picture your life as a a big, clear ball. When the grief first happens, it's like a giant, dark ball suddenly fills up the entire ball. There's nothing else. Everything is pain. Everything is grief.

People think the dark ball is meant to shrink over time, but in my experience, that's not it at all. What happens instead is that, slowly but surely, the clear ball gets bigger.

Eventually, not every moment is grief. Not every moment is pain. It's still there. It's never smaller. It never actually even hurts less. But you grow around it.

Losing someone to death is like if a color suddenly disappeared from your whole world. Let's use yellow. You've encountered so much of your life with this yellow in it. The more closely things were associated with this person,the yellower they are--and the more wrong they look now that yellow is gone.

Over time, you get used to the way they look, but you never really forget how they looked back when they were yellow. They're not as beautiful now.

But then there are other things that you encounter that haven't ever been yellow, places that person never went or things they were never a part of. You can imagine how much more beautiful they would be if they did have yellow, but they don't look wrong to you without yellow. They just look how they look, and that's the way you expect them to be beautiful.

I don't know if these images are helpful to anyone else, but they've made a big difference to me on my own grief journey, and since today would have been my sister's birthday, I thought I'd share them.

There's nothing I can say that will make it better. Just know a stranger on the internet is taking a moment to cry with your pain.

If I knew that youtube would continue to show me one skippable ad for every ~10 minutes, I would gladly disable my ad-blocker for them. Banner ads and side-bar ads are also fine.

>Hunger

>Slavery

>Genocide

All are greatly reduced in the last 100-150 years. Globally. In large part thanks to "Western" contributions to science.

The rest are some very developed and sophisticated atrocities. Being developed and sophisticated doesn't make people good, it just makes their evil deeds more sophisticated and developed.

Just to qualify: I'm not trying to promote the noble savage myth here either. I'm trying to say that the simplicity/sophistication scale is orthogonal to the good/evil scale.

>reduced hunger, but not eliminated it

>potentially exacerbated homelessness, as the income/wealth floor for maintaining a household is now higher, globally

Additionally:

>there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history

>some of the worst genocides in history are within living memory

All of the above is the result of Western cultural and logistical immaturity in the face of its industrial over-development. E.g., notice how a major global shipping lane is currently inaccessible due to war (a war ultimately cause by Western meddling in the region). It should also be noted that we're in the middle of a mass extinction driven by this same dynamic.

Any positive assessment of the West's sophistication and development has to be tempered or even nullified by the reality that its efforts have served to worsen, let alone ameliorate, basic measures of civilizational quality. An extreme analogy, using fiction: I refuse to call the civs in universes like WH40K, Dune, etc. "sophisticated and developed", because they've simply transposed and magnified age-old failings and atrocities onto a cosmic scale. True sophistication and development may eschew technological complexity, if complexity is instead in the systems and processes that support self-actualization in the population.

To go back to the original point: if the introduction of indoor plumbing and the extension of civil rights in America had been switched chronologically, we'd be much better off as a society. If landing on the moon and the acceptance and election of a female president had been switched, ditto. So, yes, it's shameful.

We now have specific terms for genocide, and varying amount of labor rights, such as non-free versus free labor, characterizing levels of deception, coercion, and force.

Homelessness is a political problem that has no business of existing, because affordable housing will have huge benefit for everyone.

To put in terms of the infinite trolley problem: The longer the trolley gets, the bigger the probability that one of the passengers is an EMT commuting to his shift, where being late could cost a life. You can add many such passengers, with various levels of complexity, where being late could end up costing a life or a livelihood.

So at some point, not hitting the brakes becomes worthwhile even just in terms of lives saved. The problem is that it is very hard to measure the exact impact of "inconveniencing" the 8 million passengers. I expect many lives will be lost if you stop a train with 8 million passengers for ~15 minutes. I would probably not stop the train with even less passengers, maybe a few hundred thousand.

Edit: added the last paragraph, to drive my point home.